Tuesday is Election Day for the Corpus Christi City Council runoffs and the city is in danger of having most of its council, including the mayor, elected by less than 10 percent of registered voters. Please, if you are a registered voter, be one of those voters. It will matter.

The council makes decisions that affect city residents' lives in a most personal way. The biggest one on most people's minds most of the time is how high the council will set property taxes. Other examples of council decisions that affect us personally include:

How much of a priority street repairs and clean drinking water will be.

What happens to a park in your neighborhood that helped you decide to buy a house in that neighborhood. The council could decide to sell it to someone intending to put more houses on it.

Which city swimming pools will remain open and the hours they will be open.

Whether to give an existing or prospective industry enticements that you help offset with your property tax dollars.

We hope that gets your attention. Five of the council's nine positions are at stake. If you are a city voter you can help choose two of the five unless you are in District 4, in which there is no runoff because incumbent Greg Smith won outright. But you still can choose a mayor and that's reason enough to vote.

The mayor is the public official most closely associated with the city's identity. He (we'd add "or she" if both runoff candidates weren't men) sets the tone for the kind of city Corpus Christi will be. He's one vote among nine but he holds the gavel during meetings and sets the agenda.

Finally, this council will decide who the next city manager will be. Corpus Christi's form of municipal government gives the day-to-day authority to the city manager. Deciding who that will be is a big decision.

Yet, only 6.7 percent of the city's registered voters voted early. We're in runoffs because no one won more than 50 percent of the vote in these five races. If interest in a runoff is going to be this low, perhaps the city should consider charter revisions to make the top vote-getter in each race the outright winner.

We also question why City Hall and the Nueces County Courthouse aren't going to be polling places on Election Day — especially City Hall, since it's City Hall's election. Both of those locations are convenient to the sizable number of residents who work downtown.

Here is a recap of our recommendations:

Mayor: Joe McComb (incumbent). We did not endorse him in the general election. We wanted change and a vision for a better quality of life. But our candidate didn't make the runoff. The one who did, Michael Hall, appears unprepared and doesn't have a plan that suggests he'd be as good a choice as McComb, much less a better one.

District 1: Everett Roy (incumbent). He's the incumbent via appointment to the unexpired term of Carolyn Vaughn, who resigned because she was appointed to fill an unexpired term on the Nueces County Commissioners Court. Roy, also, wasn't our choice in the general election but neither was his runoff opponent. Roy, a banker and war veteran, is the better-informed candidate.

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District two candidate Ben Molina participates in a League of Women Voters-Corpus Christi forum on Thursday, October 18, 2018 at City Hall. x(Photo: Rachel Denny Clow/Caller-Times)

District 2: Ben Molina (incumbent). His pragmatic approach and his stake in the city's future reflects who he is – a roofing contractor and family man with young children. This would be his second term. He deserves another.

District 3: Roland Barrera, insurance broker. Barrera has a long record of civic involvement, including being a former chairman of the Regional Transportation Authority board. Shame on his opponent, used car dealer Eric Cantu, for trying to have Barrera removed from the runoff because he missed a deadline for filing a financial disclosure. Cantu had every right to cry foul, insist that Barrera file the disclosure — which Barrera did, promptly, after it was pointed out — and question his lapse. But removal from the ballot was both extreme and not within the realm of legal remedy, thus turning what could have been righteous indignation into a low campaign stunt.

District 5: Gil Hernandez, business consultant. He has served the community in appointed positions, including the RTA board on which he was a fiscal watchdog. Opponent Paul Thurman is the executive director of the Nueces County Republican Party. The council is supposed to be nonpartisan. Both candidates are Republicans, but only Thurman earns his living from it.

Again, please vote between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Tuesday if you didn't already vote early. This election is much too important to let a tiny minority decide.